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| Volume 24 | August, 2005 | Issue No. 8 |
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ANNOUNCEMENT |
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WHAT: SUPERCOMPUTER
SALE
WHERE: COLLINSVILLE
GATEWAY CONVENTION CENTER
WHEN: August 26,
3-9 WORK THE SHOW, GET IN FREE! CHECK FOR SIGN UP SHEET AT THIS MEETING
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Progressive Raffle |
Jackpot is up to $200.00!! 33 cards left |
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Regular Meeting
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Wednesday, August 17 Caseyville Township Bldg. |
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Board |
Wednesday, September 7 5 Eastport Plaza Drive Meal starts about 6:00. Meeting starts at 7:00 Everyone is welcome |
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This
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Remote Access by Chuck Hill
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Next
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Shawn from Microsoft? |
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Hello From The
Pres... |
PROGRESSIVE
RAFFLE CONTINUES TO CONTINUE TO GROW
The raffle prize is up to $200 and we have 33 cards left in the deck. If we draw your number, you get a prize and a shot at pulling the joker out of the cards that are left when it is your turn. We're trying to come up with more good prizes for the Holiday Party Raffle. Please let me know if you have a favorite item that you think would be a good give away or if you want to donate something good to be given away.
CD/DVD REPAIR MACHINE
As I said last month, the
Board Members and I contemplated having the club get a good CD/DVD Repair
machine ($350-$500). I bought a decent one at Wal-Mart for $38.72, but, then
Chuck Hill sent me an article from PC Magazine with a review of inexpensive CD
repair tools that rated the Aleratec as the Editor's Choice. We talked about it
at the last meeting and we collectively decided to get the top kit per PC Mag's
recommendation. I ordered three of them and they will be at the next meeting.
I purchased three of them because they have three different modes. They
can just Clean , Repair or Buff.
The buffing mode buffs them back to usefulness after the repair pads scrape the
scratches out of them. They retail for $40 each, but, Amazon had them for $25
each, so, we spent the $75 and we'll see how they work. Please do not bring your
entire collection of CD's to be cleaned. If you want to try them out, please
bring one scratched CD/DVD with you and we'll test them out. I don't want
everyone to get upset if they have to wait in line. Each disc will take a minute
or two to go through the processes and we only have a few hours at each meeting.
Bring one and then we'll decide how to proceed with bigger collections if we
like how they work.
COMPUTER SHOW = COMING VERY SOON
Everyone is
starting to see the advertisements for the show on the billboards etc. I hope
that means that they are going to do it right this time.
Put the show on your calendars for August 26th-28th. Please sign up for the show at the meeting and/or just show up and help in the booth if you can..
COMPUTER DEMO = CHUCK HILL's REMOTE ACCESS EXTRAVAGANZA
Shawn from Microsoft may be with us in November due to a new baby and a few conflicting trips out of town over the next few months, but, we have someone even better to share his knowledge with us. It's Chuck Hill, and he is going to go over the multitude of ways to gain access to your computer when you are not home. Remote access is it's name and he'll show us how to play the game. I need to watch this one, so, I hope there aren't a lot of computers that need fixing...
GRIZZLIES GAME
Let me know if you are interested in attending a Grizzlies baseball game. We'd like to go before the season is over...
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See
you at the meeting … Mike |
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The Computer
Master |
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The Treasurer's
Report |
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TREASURER’S REPORT DIANNE WHITE, TREASURER AS OF AUG. 1ST, 2005 BALANCE AS OF JULY 1ST, 2005 $5,526.96 INCOME: 4 NEW MEMBERSHIPS@15 EA 60.00 3 RENEWALS @15 EA. 45.00 CD SALES .00 JULY ROLL-OVER JACKPOT 92.00 TOTAL INCOME: $197.00 $5723.96 EXPENSES: PONDEROSA-AUG. DEPOSIT 20.00 TOTAL EXPENSES: $20.00 $5703.96 BALANCE AS OF AUG. 1ST, 2005 $5703.96 ROLL OVER JACKPOT $200.00 CARDS LEFT 33 |
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The Secretary's Report |
July 05 minutes.
President Mike Taphorn opened the meeting by welcoming the
members, new members and guests. He
continued by explaining about our club website and how to use it.
He announced that our regular presentation had to be cancelled due to
circumstances beyond our control. Mike
also explained briefly about the upcoming computer show coming to Collinsville
pretty soon and called upon the membership to volunteer our services to help
during those three days to assist in any capacity that will help our club.
He also said that there were instances when a CD could not be read due to
scratches on it and the information was, for all practical purposes, lost.
He recommended that we research and try to procure two or three of the
best buffers to remove and polish the CD that way the information would not be
lost completely. The buffers would
be available to all our members during our regular meetings.
More information to be presented during our next meeting as to the
brands, quality and prices. Also he asked the membership for their thoughts
about obtaining a CD burner for the club. More to be discussed next meeting.
Our own Membership Chairman, J.C., informed us that there were 129
in good standing. Our Business sponsor Mr. Bob Havlin informed us that Micro
Soft will be hosting a show during Aug. the 2nd.
The membership was invited to attend any of the two shows, one at 8am and
the second at 1pm. Good information comes out those meetings according to Mr.
Havlin. Jason, our librarian,
informed us that the new and improved monthly CD was available and also that he
would gladly replace any defective CDs bought last month. He also said that he expanded the contents of the new CD.
The Q and A followed the regular meeting and an impromptu
presentation on Microsoft Graphic Suite was given by Mike Taphorn.
Our next meeting will be held on Aug. 17th at 7pm in the same location.
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Till then, Carlos
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The Membership
Chairman |
| Number of Members in attendance last month: | |
| Total Membership Before last month's meeting | |
| Number of Members renewing last meeting | |
| Number Of Members joined last meeting | |
| Number of members dropped | |
| Current Total Membership | |
| Number of Members in Good Standing | 129 |
| Number of Members on Probation | |
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The Web Master |
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![]() Assistant Dennis McMurtrey |
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Well for this month’s disk release I’ve put
together a small collection of cool freeware/shareware utilities that
I’ve found on the web. Lots
of different things here. I’ll
give a list here and then try and highlight a few of the programs: 7Zip - Zip Compression alternative Powerpoint Backgrounds A-Squared Personal Trojan Scanner BWMeter V2.0.2 - Track net activity Cd Winder - File cataloguer Cool Web Shredder - fixes Cool Web Trojan attacks Direct X9.0c - Newest DirectX Upgrade Ewido Security Suite v3.50 - Trojan Killer Express Assist 7 Trial - backup Outlook-cookies Firepanel XP - upgrade firewalls to Service Pack 2 Foxit PDF Editor 1.2 - Freeware pdf editor Foxit Reader - Freeware pdf reader PageGrab v3.0 - Graphics image grabber Irfan View - Photo Viewer Jalbum - create online photo albums JiWire - portable wi-fi finder Maximus DVD v1.2 - Dvd Player OpenOffice V1.1.4 - Complete MSOffice replacement pdfcreator v0.8.0 - Freeware PDF Creator SlimServer v5.2.1 - Play music from home remote SyncBack - Backup-Synchronize files-folders WinDirStat - Windows Statistics-cleanup World Wind - 3D Viewable Globe (Sat. imaging) X-Setup Pro 6.6 Final - Windows Tweaking XnView - Multi-format graphics viewer Xplorer2 Pro - Windows Explorer replacement First, I’ve included a little over 50 megs of
Freeware Powerpoint Backgrounds.
Most of these are setup as PowerPoint files, however some are
just images that need to be imported to be used, however they are all
freely distributable. A
couple of club members had requested some office support files,
specifically some different PowerPoint files, so I tried to get some
to put on a disk release. Please
let me know if these work for you and if you’d like to see similar
MS support files and I’ll see what I can do. Next, I’ve got several security/internet minded
programs, like BWMeter v2.0.2 – it tracks network activity, Ewido
Security Suite 3.50 – it’s a great Trojan killer, Cool Web
Shredder – which fixes Cool Web Trojan Attacks, Firepanel XP –
which upgrades firewalls to be compatible with Service Pack 2, and
JiWire – a portable Wi-Fi detector for your laptop. Also, I’ve included some other cool stuff like
freeware PDF viewer and PDF editor from Foxit (which neither one has
to be installed, but will run from a portable device.), a PDF creator
called pdfcreator v0.8.0, and OpenOffice v1.1.4 – which is a MS
Office compatible freeware office suite. There are several other graphics utilities, and
file editors, but the other program I’d like to highlight, is called
World Wind. This program
is from NASA. It is a
fully rendered globe of the Earth that is zoomable, and has uses
actual satellite photo’s to make it fully realistic.
This is a large part of the cd as the program is over 180 megs,
and of course if very graphics intensive.
However, I thought it was well worth the space. That’s all I have for right now, however a few
suggestions were made at the last board of directors meetings for new
disk releases. If anyone
finds things on the internet that they like downloaded but either have
a slow internet connection, or don’t want to take the time to get,
just drop me line. I’d
be happy to d/l them for you and put them on a disk for pickup at the
next club meeting. The
normal $1.00 per disk fee would be assessed, and I could also include
that file in a disk release. Most
of the time I tend to be at a loss as to what club members are using
or would like to use given the opportunity.
If you have any needs in this area or are looking for a
specific kind of program, please let me know and I’ll be happy to
oblige as I’m able to.
Thanx,
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The Editor |
| I've been lazy again this month, nothing to report. I'll be interviewing for Newsletter Editor or Webmaster soon. |
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Mitch's Corner |
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GCC - Tweaks and Fixes for Windows XP Inbox ***
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Later,
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Miscellaneous |
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The Lighter
Side |
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Computer Stupidities Check this out. VERY funny. http://www.rinkworks.com/stupid/ *** http://www.youmightbe.com/pages/computergeek.html Both submitted by Chuck H.
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